Thomas Heath is away, but we still found some things of interest to pass on until he returns.
When Jeremy Farber launched his company 10 years ago under the name Miami Computers, the moniker was a bit of a misnomer. After all, its headquarters was actually in upstate New York.
Today, the Chantilly-based firm is called PC Recycler but even that name isn’t a perfect fit. Farber’s company doesn’t just discard old electronics, it first wipes their data and shreds them into confetti.
“A couple of our big customers early on were big government contractors and they loved us, but they were really interested in information security,” Farber said. “It was a very big priority to them, more so than the environmental aspect of it.”
The latest tool in that effort is a $100,000 machine that allows the firm to destroy equipment faster through a process called degaussing. Essentially the magnetic field that allows a device to store data is eliminated, and the data is taken along with it.
There’s no shortage of devices to demolish as cybersecurity concerns continue to trouble government and commercial entities alike, Farber said. Though most security efforts are aimed at a device that’s in use, he said the risks don’t necessarily end once it’s unplugged.
“Because a lot of the attacks come over the Net it gets a lot of publicity, but there are just as many breaches that happen through physical loss,” he said. “A lot of people don’t understand that the information is just as accessible once the device is offline.”
— Steven Overly
Friendship Heights says goodbye to Pottery Barn
Pottery Barn has been added to the growing list of merchants vacating Friendship Heights. The home furnishings store notified customers last week that its location at Chevy Chase Pavilion will close on Jan. 16., making it the third retailer in the area, after Borders and Filene’s Basement, to turn off the lights in the past 12 months.
Officials at Williams-Sonoma, which owns Pottery Barn and West Elm, were not available for comment. No other Pottery Barn stores are slated to close, according Williams-Sonoma’s most recent regulatory filings. Pottery Barn, with 7 percent increase in revenues in the third quarter, has been leading the company’s sales growth.
The home furnishing store has locations in Clarendon, Tysons Corner and White Flint. The store at the Pavilion, located at 5335 Wisconsin Ave. NW, occupies two floors. It’s unclear whether Akridge Real Estate Services, which owns the nine-story complex, has another tenant lined up for the space, since the company did not return calls for comment.
— Danielle Douglas
New York Ave. developers duel for tenants
When Lowe’s, the home improvement chain, pulled out of plans to anchor a development in Baltimore in October, it prompted concerns that the chain also would opt against opening a store on New York Avenue in a planned development in Northeast Washington where Wal-Mart also has agreed to open a new location.
Both projects have the same developer, Rick Walker, and Walker had long pitched the plan of building the Wal-Mart store on top of a home improvement big box on New York Avenue at the corner of Bladensburg Road, just as he planned to build a Wal-Mart store above a Lowe’s in Baltimore.
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